(Harare, August 3, 2018) Six members of La Via Campesina Brazil began an indefinite hunger strike on July 31 in front of the headquarters of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) of Brasilia to demand Lula’s freedom and respect for democracy, after a parliamentary coup that has shown its worst face of violence in this last period.

In this context, delegates of La Via Campesina member organizations from Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America, gathered at the Florestan Fernandes School, expressed their solidarity with militants who are on hunger strike to demand justice in Brazil, in a scenario of irregularities and arbitrariness.

We salute the courage and daring of the militants of the member organizations of La Via Campesina Brazil, who, in an atmosphere of disadvantage and impunity, have had the political clarity and commitment to arrange their lives for their country, for their people, so that hunger does not deepen again the enormous contradictions that capitalism is building in our territories.

We are proud to have before us struggles of movements that are strong in the construction of peasant internationalism in the world, such as the Movimiento de Pequeños Agricultores, MPA and the Movimiento de Trabajadores Rurales Sin Tierra, MST, in addition to the other organizations that have joined this call.

Like La Via Campesina, we condemn all the atrocity that the Brazilian people live through in order to cover up political and partisan interests that, under the force of a bourgeois, racist and sexist law, impose violence on the poorest, privatization of national goods, forcing the people to unemployment and misery, and therefore to the failure to implement agrarian reform and food sovereignty through agroecology.

Finally, we hold Brazil’s institutional powers responsible for the lives of our comrades on hunger strike. We also call on our organizations, friends and allies to take action in the embassies of their countries; any expression of solidarity is essential to denounce the serious situation in this country.

Solidarity is the strength of the people!Fight, to build Popular Agrarian Reform!